William Faulkner
Intro
William Faulkner was a novelist from Mississippi and a major figure in American literature. He wrote 13 novels and a number of short stories, mainly set in the American South in the early 20th century. His work helped define the genre of Southern Gothic, in which the traditional tropes of Gothic literature (isolation, decay, madness, death, disease) are set against the backdrop of the southern United States.
Stylistically, Faulkner was a modernist, heavily influenced by James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Like other modernists, he was looking for new ways to tell stories about the human experience without relying on traditional literary techniques like chronological storytelling or the singular viewpoint of a defined narrator. Faulkner’s modernist literature employs stream-of-consciousness, fragmented timelines, and jumps in perspective, forcing the reader to confront the narrative actively rather than being carried along by it. Although the stories all take place in realistic settings and follow realistic characters, the experience of reading them is unsettling and sometimes confusing.
Bio
William Faulkner was born in Mississippi in 1897. His family was not especially wealthy, but his father had a prominent place as a university administrator, and his grandfather had risen to the rank of Colonel in the Confederate army. Faulkner himself was an uninspired student and never even finished high school.
He wrote mostly poetry in his early life and traveled to New Orleans and New York in search of an audience. At one point he claimed (falsely) to have served in World War I. Faulkner then returned to Mississippi, where he got a job in the post office of the same university where his father worked. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Faulkner was so lazy and disengaged that the post office ultimately had to get rid of him.
By the time he reached his 30s, Faulkner was writing more novels and less poetry, but he still wanted to write great literature, not commercially successful books. He wrote The Sound and the Fury, one of his most challenging works, during this period, and refused to let an editor make any changes. Editors thought readers would find the book tangled and confusing, and consequently that no one would by it, but Faulkner wasn’t interested. He believed he was writing something great, and didn’t care whether it was popular.
The competing demands of art and money followed Faulkner throughout his career. He occasionally compromised his artistic preferences when he was in especially dire financial need, as when he took on work as a screenwriter despite a virulent distaste for Hollywood culture. But his work ultimately earned him recognition as a literary artist, especially in Europe. In 1949, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his contributions to the modernist movement.
Faulkner struggled with alcoholism throughout his life, and the problem seems to have gotten worse after his Nobel Prize. He suffered a fatal heart attack in 1962 at age 64.
Faulkner’s Themes
Race
As a Southern writer writing about the South, Faulkner could hardly have avoided the topic of race. In one of his novels, Light in August, Faulkner presents readers with a main character whose race is ambiguous – the protagonist believes he is African American, but is light skinned and never knew his parents, so the reader never knows for sure. Light in August creates an impression of race as a social fiction, a story we tell ourselves about ourselves, not a biological fact. This is the overwhelming majority opinion in both literature and biology today, but was controversial in 1932 when Light in August was published.
Despite what might seem to be a progressive attitude on race, Faulkner was later criticized for failing to embrace the Civil Rights movement. Faulkner argued that change must come gradually and that revolutionary change would disrupt the basic fabric of society. Other writers, especially African American writers like James Baldwin, pointed out that the purpose of revolutionary change was to disrupt that social fabric and undo the injustices woven into it at its formation.
Faulkner made things worse for himself in 1956, when he told an interviewer he worried that the Civil Rights Movement would lead to a new Civil War. He said that desegregation and racial justice were noble goals, but that if they were achieved by fiat of federal power they would only cause bloodshed. He then went on to say:
if it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes … I will go on saying that the Southerners are wrong and that their position is untenable, but if I have to make [that choice] then I’ll make it.
Even in the racially benighted 1950s, this was a shocking thing for a novelist to say. Faulkner disavowed those comments and later said he had been drunk during the interview and meant none of what he said…but his reputation as a racial progressive never recovered.
Perspective
Faulkner’s influence comes largely from his interest in perspective. Traditional novels tell a story from a single viewpoint – either a character within the story or an omniscient narrator who knows everything. In other words, they have either a limited perspective or an unlimited one. Faulkner’s novels were among the first to experiment with multiple points of view – the story is told from several characters’ perspective, which allows the reader to triangulate reality from multiple people’s subjective perceptions.
Family
Faulkner used the technique of shifting perspective to tell grand stories that took place on a larger scale than the traditional novel with its single protagonist. In As I Lay Dying, perhaps his most famous novel, Faulkner does away with the single protagonist and instead tells the story of an entire family in their conflicts and struggles as poor, rural Southerners. The plot revolves around the death of Addie Bundren and told from the perspective of more than a dozen other characters, mainly her children, their spouses, and other ancillary figures associated with the family.
Quotes
There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing.
Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1950, when the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still fresh in the memory of the world. In that context, he said, people were not engaged in the kind of introspection that gave great literature its power.
In Popular Culture
The Southern Gothic genre has inspired plenty of popular entertainment. The Walking Dead takes place in the ruins of the rural south and takes Gothic tropes of decay and doom to a horrifying extreme. The video game Left 4 Dead 2 has exactly the same aesthetic. Another Southern Gothic movie is 1998’s Beloved, based on Toni Morrison’s novel and starring Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey.